KARL-HEINZ LOTZ

Karl Heinz Lotz was born in 1946 in Teicha, a small village near Halle, the son of a locksmith and a housewife. After passing his A-Levels in Halle in 1965 and training as an electrician, Lotz began studying physics and mathematics at the Pädagogische Hochschule "Karl Liebknecht" in Potsdam, which he discontinued after one semester. Through various auxiliary work activities, he finally reached the Potsdam Hans Otto Theater as a lighting contractor. In 1970, he became the manager of the DEFA studio for feature films and later director-assistant on television in the GDR. In 1971, he began studying directing at Potsdam College of Film and Television and, after completing his studies, returned to the DEFA studio for feature films, where he gained experience during a five-year directing assistant. He worked in this capacity with well-known DEFA directors such as Roland Oehme, Egon Schlegel, Roland Gräf and Rainer Simon together before he staged his first feature film in the early 1980s.
With the realized in 1981 Jens Bahre film adaptation, the children's film The Fat and I succeeded Lotz a much-noticed debut. His first work was classified by film critics as "sensitively filmed". With his second film Young People in the City (1985) he was honored in 1987 with the Max Ophüls Prize in Saarbrücken. Other films were made, often for a younger audience, such as 1988, the DEFA fairy tale film Der Eisenhans (1988) after a substance of the Brothers Grimm (edited by Katrin Lange) or 1990 I can also reverse, a film that dealt with the physical disability.
In addition to his work for film and television Lotz also worked for the broadcasting of the GDR and produced, inter alia, the mid-1980s Maybe there is a sky with horses, a post about the 91-year-old German war veteran Rudolph Meffner, who was then one of the last living German cavalrymen of the Russian Civil War. In 1986, under his leadership, he produced the documentary Jung, we are still alive, and was awarded Best Documentary at the International Film Festival in Oberhausen.